Learning about/from psychoanalysis

“internalization of hegemonic structures and ideology”“Information technology has collapsed time and space so that we now suffer the mass-mediated experience of living in and through one crisis after another as if it were right here, right now—no matter where in the world it occurs. This steady diet of violence creates a traumatogenic culture that at any moment might puncture our defensive efforts to maintain what Winnicott (1960) called a sense of going-on-being. Self-protectively, we lose ourselves in personal private concerns that appear to be divorced from the instability all around us.”-okay, wow, I think this is the perfect description for something I’ve been reckoning with as I try to decrease the amount of news/media I consume daily“This appeal to disavow the link between social forces and personal life reflects not only a defense against psychic overwhelm but the ethic of individualism as well that is at the heart of our social surround.”“The collectively shared malaise of contemporary society permeates the psychoanalytic frame, whether we choose to recognize it or not.”“Their restrictive gaze misses the larger ideological and institutional contexts that frame the frame and saturate the psychoanalytic process. Might this focus on the private domain of the family function as a refuge, a container that protects both analyst and patient from anxieties provoked by a threatening world? Is it a barricade of disavowal that limits the potential of the psychoanalytic process to create more critically reflexive subjects?”“the individual evolves in relationship to the collective and to the symbolic and institutional structures of authority and power, which are internalized as aspects of personal identity that ought to be recognized and attended to within the clinical encounter.”“to the extent that we operate with an ahistorical perspective, we inhibit our ability to function as a resource for our patients’ elaboration of resistance to existing social structures and ideologies that are actually a significant source of their suffering. Locating the family as the exclusive source of identity formation and psychological conflict may constrain our ability to appreciate how its traditional function as a core site of discipline is profoundly challenged in the contemporary period. Extrafamilial transnational social, economic, and technological forces exert great influence on psychological experience, identifications, and interpersonal relations”“I am proposing a social psychoanalytic formulation that captures the dialectical complexity of subject formation and subject position, in which the individual is submerged in experience that is neither internal nor external but characterized by a fluidity between the two domains”-fascinating way to explain the model and analysis“those who occupy positions of power in the social order, which he called the “historic bloc,” retain their authority primarily through consensual rather than coercive means. They exert control over the material resources and institutional structures of the State and civil society, facilitated by “organic intellectuals” whose design of the ideological apparatus permeates and is reproduced through the family, the church, the media, the educational system, political parties, and “experts” who hold the key and convey the rules of achieving the culture’s ideals (Hoate & Nowell Smith, 1971). Hegemony is never absolute; the ruling bloc and its ideological institutions must negotiate with a number of competing ideologies, the least offensive of which can be absorbed and the most threatening of which are controlled through coercive power”“The ruling bloc’s design of the dominant social symbols of the culture are powerful because they are constructed as universal and abstract and are thus experienced by the majority of individuals as the common sense of an entire social order (Boggs, 1984), one that is internalized and shapes their identifications, whether or not these function in their real interest. Judith Butler (1997, p. 3) put it this way: “…power that at first appears as external, pressed upon the subject, pressing the subject into subordination, assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject’s self identity.””“Hegemony works not just in the realm of ideas but in the bodily and psychic manifestation of identifications based on one’s intersectional membership in class, ethnic, gender, and sexual categories. We repeatedly enact these identifications through the most intimate gestures—how we eat, walk, talk, laugh, and yell, how we express our nonverbal affective connections and passionate identifications and disidentifications. These behaviors illuminate how we unconsciously reproduce the symbolic renderings of hierarchical power relations, which are felt to be so normative that they remain largely unconscious”-and how these behaviors and identities intersect“The deception at the root of neoliberalism is that its ideological support of a pared-down state that eschews regulatory functions hides its actual behaviors that guarantee financial and corporate actors free access to profit making and concentration of economic power.”“The state no longer assumes the role of guarantor of a socially responsible distribution of health and welfare standards accessible to all the population. These rights have been privatized: from public higher education to individually debt-financed education; from social security to individual savings and delayed retirement, if any; from public infrastructure to fees for use; from provision of services for old age and ill health to privatized insurance; from access to work at liveable wages to periodic or chronic unemployment and homelessness. This shift from public to private financing of the daily requirements of living exacerbates inequality and deepens anxieties related to daily survivability”“The model neoliberal citizen is one who accepts individual responsibility for his or her fate, a citizen who does not apprehend the social world in terms of differential power relations reified in social, political, and economic structures that benefit the elite classes and eviscerate the rights of the majority”“All of these strains produce fragmentation of and isolation from solid community and interpersonal bonds, and an overall sense of loss. A feeling of uprootedness is intensified as individuals search for a position within social and economic structures that are themselves increasingly unreliable and disembedded.”“a narcissistic character is fostered based on the denigration of attachment needs and the overevaluation of agentic capacities, requiring those who occupy privileged positions in a variety of social hierarchies to project dependency and need onto the less powerful. Shame, the quintessential emotion associated with the inability to embody the cultural ideal of autonomy and self-sufficiency, is the affective ally of hegemony. Failure is experienced as proof of personal inadequacy rather than social catastrophe. Shame often produces vengeful rage chaotically expressed.”“This is a traumatogenic third, no longer outside the range of normal experience; rather, it is the new normativity. The danger is that denial and disavowal create a bystander population that through inaction reinforces the very conditions that prompt these defenses in the first place.”“I believe that we are all sufferers in these times of social malaise. Our challenge is to uproot ourselves from the bystander position produced when we turn our backs on the seriousness of contemporary social crises.”“The values of citizenship are being activated on behalf of social justice and human rights so deeply assaulted by neoliberal policy and ideology. If politics is the struggle over the institution of social meaning, we are witnessing in the current outburst of progressive as well as conservative movements a tumultuous rejection of a social system the priorities of which are so profoundly destructive. Counter-hegemonic demands for a politics of healing—of both social maladies and the earth—are now constituents of the social surround that frames the psychoanalytic frame. Hopefully they, too, will make their way into the analytic process as countervailing agitators of yearnings for social connection and collaboration”